#374 Rare Jeff Bezos Interview

From day one in his very first shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos emphasized the importance of having the very best team. He wrote, setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success. Jeff's focus on talent is just like this quote from Steve Jobs that actually happened in an interview that very same year. Steve gave this interview in 1997, and Steve said, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or a 100 to one. Given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream. You're well advised to build a team that pursues a plus players, and that is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last twelve months, they hired only point 23% of the people that applied. So when you use Ramp, you now have access to top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf twenty four seven to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations, and they do this all on a single platform. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. In the end of that interview, Steve Jobs added, he said a small team of a plus players can run circles around a giant team of b and c players. From a customer perspective, what does a team of a plus players sound like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said, Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check-in on because they have it handled. Ramp gives you everything you need to optimize all of your financial operations on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. Jeff Bezos just did this interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the deal book summit. And the interview gave me so much energy. That actually printed out after I finished listening to it. I printed out the transcript and it's like 45 pages along when you print it out and actually went through …